"As it Happens" - Jimmy Savile O.B.E.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I have been working on an essay about this freak for over a year now, so I felt obligated to track this down and read it. I wound up getting a library bound first edition, which is surely a strange thing to celebrate. As it happens, the photographs alone were worth the price. The back cover is a haunting B&W shot of The Duchess herself, reverently holding at framed photograph of Savile, his head bowed in an unmistakably Christ-like pose.

Savile is an eminently readable chatterbox with a gift for phrasing. The content is consistently horrifying, but it is hardly hard reading.



I am taking notes on sections to transcribe, and with an eye to build a chronology out of his account vs. the record of accusations.

pg. 38: "It's all in the mind; to the pure, all things are pure."

[Wombaticus Rex]

Green Beret Jimmy "I hate to fly" Savile

Indeed; the book references a plane trip to Moscow in the 1950's and...well, let's just starting transcribbling, shall we?

pg. 94

I decided to go to Moscow. For no other reason than that I had never been there before. For instance, sitting in a cinema in London, well disguised, it occurred to me that I had never been to the Isles of Scilly. Jumping up before the film had finished I rushed back to my small hotel, grabbed a few things and caught the night sleeper to Penzance...

The Moscow trip was hysterical. Quite a long battle it was for me to get a visa. It was in the late 1950s and the cold war was really cold. A Britisher to go to Moscow on his own, for no reason, was definitely suspect.

pg. 98

Some years later I was in East Berlin. There is an enormous mass grave there built by the Russians ...

pg. 151

I have a friend in Tangier who lives in a palace. Seventy-five candles burn in his entrance hall. Guest arrive by jet and yacht and when I'm there my thoughts, some of the time, stray back to the Morning Star Hostel for Destitute Men in Manchester. It's a strange world all right, and seeing as we'll never quite straighten it out in our lifetime, there's not much harm in enjoying it. As long as it's not at the expense of others.

pg. 167

Most autobiographies are written at the end of someone's life. This one is not like that because long after the date of publication I have lots of big new things planned. Like a special in-depth tour of Black Sea ports and the far end of the Mediterranean basin. Like also for years all sorts of American interests have wanted me to go there for TV work and lecture tours of the American colleges. I have a permanent open offer to wrestle in Japan, Australia and other antipodean paradises send messages with visiting TV chiefs.

Overall, none of that squares with this curious passage from a Baffler essay on Savile:

[b]Edit: Also, this long-form Baffler piece is excellent, probably posted before but bears repeating: http://thebaffler.com/past/predator_drone

Especially for this:

After a hairy incident involving a stunt with the Royal Air Force, Savile hated to fly, so with the exception of one early trip to America to meet Elvis Presley, he never spent much time in the States, settling for Blighty ubiquity rather than the transatlantic fame of Tina Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Piers Morgan, and all the many rock acts Savile put before the British public on Top of the Pops. And though he was a national celebrity from around 1964 until his death, he was always a doggedly provincial one, never letting go of a foothold in his native Leeds, and at the same time running around the country staging talk shows like Savile’s Travels, ingratiating himself with the local authorities and grandees, and bringing out crowds to make hospital donations.After the revelations of his predations, it’s hard not to think he was casting his net wide. He often traveled in a van with a mattress in the rear.